Posts Tagged ‘King Hussein’

In 1967, tensions rose in the Middle East. The Arab countries surrounding Israel formed alliances, taking belligerent positions toward the Jewish State. In May 1967, Israel’s northern sector saw a series of attacks. By mid-May, the president of Egypt, Gamal Abdel Nasser, began massing his troops in the Sinai Peninsula and expelled the UN forces present in that area. He also declared the Straits of Tiran closed to Israeli shipping. Following a defense pact between Jordan and Egypt, the Iraqi army deployed troops in Jordan.

It understood that its main chance of survival was to strike the enemy by surprise.

From left to right: Gamal Abdel Nasser, Sadat, Ali Sabri and Hussein el-Shafei

In 1962, Maj. Gen. Ezer Weizman, commander of the Air Force, had already planned an operation that would shut down all the air forces of enemy nations. In order to be effective, the IDF understood it first had to strike the airport runways that would keep planes on the ground.

The mission had to be a complete surprise for it to succeed. The orders of the Air Force Commander were clear: pilots would fly at low altitude and would not under any condition use communication lines — not for take off, not during flight and not even if a pilot had a technical problem and needed to eject. They would make contact only after the first round of strikes.

In 1964, about three years before the war, the IDF planned the 24 hour mission as a defensive measure against Israel’s increasingly hostile enemies. Senior commanders discussed the operation with the highest of secrecy and named it “Moked.”

The Operation Begins

Major General Mordechai “Mottie” Hod, Air Force Commander, and Lt. Gen. Yitzahk Rabin, then IDF Chief of Staff, decided on June 4th to launch Operation Moked. After receiving the clearance from the political echelon in the afternoon, a few air base officers were gathered to receive the instructions from their commanders.

At around 4:00 AM, pilots received their instructions for the attack that would occur at 7:45 AM precisely in 11 different targets throughout Egypt. The enemy was caught completely by surprise. After destroying their airport runways, the IAF planes fired on the Egyptian squadron barricaded on the ground.

The first wave of the attack continued for two hours and 197 egyptian planes were destroyed. In addition, six airports were shut down.

By the end of the first wave, Lt. Gen. Yitzhak Rabin ordered the ground forces to invade the Sinai, initiating what would later be called the Six Day War. A couple of hours later, the IAF attacked Egypt a second time to ensure that all targets were hit, and to destroy radar and electronic infrastructure.

At 11:30 AM, following a Syrian air attack, the commander of the Israel Air Force decided to redirect planes to Syria and destroy Syrian airports. In parallel, King Hussein of Jordan — based on false reports of Egyptian succes — decided to join the war and launched attacks against Israel. Informed by IDF intelligence about the imminence of the attack, the IAF decided to destroy the Jordanian airports and planes.

Later that day, intelligence reports pointed out that Iraq would join the war. Instantly, the IDF decided to launch an attack on the H-3 airport in western Iraq.

On Sunday, March 31, Jordan’s King Abdullah II and the acting leader of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, signed an agreement to jointly defend Jerusalem “from Israeli Judaization attempts.”

A statement issued by Abdullah’s palace expressed the terms of the agreement and asserted Jordan’s role as custodian of the Temple Mount and other “Muslim holy sites” in Jerusalem. As custodian, the King asserted, he maintains all rights to exert all legal efforts to preserve them.

It is also emphasising the historical principles agreed by Jordan and Palestine to exert joint efforts to protect the city and holy sites from Israeli judaisation attempts. It also reaffirms the historic principles upon which Jordan and Palestine are in agreement as regards Jerusalem and their common goal of defending Jerusalem together, especially at such critical time, when the city is facing dramatic challenges and daily illegal changes to its authenticity and original identity.

Jordan’s custodial role over holy sites in Jerusaelm is derived from Article 9 of the 1994 Jordanian Peace Treaty with Israel.

Contrary to the presentation by Abdullah and Abbas, the Peace Treaty, signed by King Hussein of Jordan and Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, is between Israel and Jordan; the PA does not play a role. The “Washington Agreement,” which set out the understanding for the terms of the Treaty, requires Israel to acknowledge the custodial role of Jordan over “Muslim holy shrines in Jerusalem,” it does not require Israel to allow Jordan to prevent “Judaization” of the city. What it does require is for Jordan and Israel “to act together to promote interfaith relations among the three monotheistic religions.”

At the time the Treaty was entered into, the details enraged the Arab Palestinians who saw the decision to award the custodial role to Jordan as a way of negating their claims to the Jerusalem sites.

The Jordinian state news agency Petra says His Majesty King Abdullah II told a delegation of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations CPMAJO on Tuesday that Israel’s unilateral policies, including measures to change the identity of Jerusalem and threaten its holy sites, constitute a major obstacle to resumption of peace efforts.

The King, who reviewed efforts to bring about peace between Palestinians and Israel, told the Royal Court audience that Jordan would continue in its endeavor to assist the sides to go back to the negotiating table.

The Kingdom, he pledged, would work with the other parties in the world community to overcome hurdles blocking realisation of the two-state solution, a Palestinian state living in peace alongside Israel.

During the meeting, attended by the King’s advisers, His Majesty emphasised that the United States should remain involved in efforts to arrive at a comprehensive peace that fulfills the rights of all parties and safeguards the region’s security and stability.

Failure to make headway in peace efforts, the King warned, would exacerbate tension in a region where some countries have been witnessing unprecedented political transformations.

The great kingdom of Jordan is no stranger to peace obstacles:

On September 16, 1970, His Majesty’s late father King Hussein sent the 60th Armored Brigade of the Jordanian Army to attack the headquarters of Palestinian organizations in Amman; the army also attacked camps in Irbid, Salt, Sweileh, Baq’aa, Wehdat and Zarqa. The PLO later claimed that the Jordanian army killed between 10,000 and 25,000 Palestinians.

● “Kill the Jews wherever you find them. Kill them with your arms, with your hands, with your nails and teeth.” (King Hussein, Radio Amman, June 6, 1967)

● Nasser: Will his majesty make an announcement on the participation of the Americans and the British?…. Will we say the U.S. and England or just the U.S.?

King Hussein: The U.S. and England.

Nasser: Good. King Hussein will make an announcement and I will make an announcement.

King Hussein: Thank You. (Conversation picked up by Israeli intelligence, June 1967, as Nasser and Hussein plotted to lie about U.S. and British participation in Israel’s sweeping military triumph.)

● “After we perform our duty in liberating the West Bank and Jerusalem, our national duty is to liberate all the Arab territories.” (King Hussein, Radio Amman, Dec. 1, 1973)

● “The removal of the Israeli occupation from our occupied land, Palestine, is the first and basic condition for just peace…. The Islamic nation and just believers in any religion or creed will not accept the situation of the…cradle of prophets and divine messages being captive of Zionist occupation.” (King Hussein, Amman Domestic Service, July 11, 1988)

There was just something so false in the universal acclaim for King Hussein on the occasion of his death eight years ago this week – false because most media accounts failed to offer a full reckoning of the Jordanian monarch’s life, with journalists whitewashing or ignoring its many inconvenient chapters and plentiful examples of ugly rhetoric.

With the exception of Sid Zion, who in his Daily News column noted Hussein’s bloodthirsty instructions to his troops during the Six-Day War, the tone almost universally adopted by the media in covering Hussein’s demise was reflected in the sugary prose of columnist Richard Chesnoff, whose tribute to Hussein, which appeared in the Daily News on the same day as Zion’s much more realistic appraisal, ended like this (diabetics are duly cautioned):

“Now this great son of the desert is gone, and all the children of Abraham weep. We will sorely miss this brave brother of ours.”

Rarely in recent memory had the passing of a public figure elicited the hyperbole that began spreading across the land once it became clear that Hussein was hours away from death. Typical of the distortions by a media intent on canonizing the king was the statement by the pompous New York Times foreign-affairs sage Thomas Friedman that Hussein “talked himself out of the 1973 war.”

The idea that Hussein sat on the sidelines in 1973 was parroted in many a news story in the days following the king’s death. While it’s true that Hussein was considerably less enthusiastic about going to war in 1973 than he’d been in 1967, when he lost a large chunk of his kingdom after ignoring Israel’s pleas that he stay out of the fighting, he nevertheless was far from a passive bystander.

As Mitchell G. Bard points out in his indispensable Myths and Facts: A Guide to the Arab-Israeli Conflict, Hussein sent “two of his best units – the 40th and 60th armored brigades – to Syria. This force took positions in the southern sector, defending the main Amman-Damascus route and attacking Israeli positions along the Kuneitra-Sassa road on October 16. Three Jordanian artillery batteries also participated in the assault, carried out by nearly 100 tanks.”

Virtually forgotten in the rush to sanctify Hussein in death was the scorn that had come his way over the years for such behavior as his constant double-dealing in his relations with Israel, the U.S. and his fellow Arabs; his allowing the desecration of Jewish holy places when Jordan had possession of East Jerusalem (gravestones of Jews were used as latrines in army camps, and dozens of synagogues were demolished or turned into stables and chicken coops); his tight-fisted rule over the Palestinians of Judea and Samaria for nearly two decades after 1948; his brutal slaughter of thousands of Palestinians in the infamous “Black September” of 1970; and his support of Saddam Hussein during the 1991 Gulf War coupled with his circumvention of the U.S.-led blockade of Iraq.

To be fair, the new, more statesmanlike persona he adopted in the final years of his life was, by all appearances, genuine. And the argument can certainly be made that even before then he was the lesser of evils when compared with other Arab leaders.

But to trumpet someone like King Hussein as a prophet, a giant, or a visionary (three of the more popular terms used by journalists in the wake of his passing) was to drain those words of any real meaning.